What is a Better Blogging Experience?

February 17, 2016

I first shared that Eric and I are working on a set of plugins that will lead to a better blogging experience, it spawned a handful of questions many of which ended up in my inbox.

On one hand, I love that because it shows there’s interest in what’s happening (and if you want to continue to follow along with what is happening, then don’t forget to sign up for the mailing list), but on the other hand, it also sets an unclear level of expectations.

As far as the former is concerned, that’s awesome. But for the latter? I’m no fan of that. Instead, I’d rather set a realistic level of expectations, so those who are interested know what to expect.

A Better Blogging Experience

Over the past few years, we’ve seen the rise of some different blogging platforms like Medium and Ghost. We’ve even seen a desktop application for WordPress.

None of the above are even tangentially related to what it is we’re going after.

Instead, try to think of it this way:

You’re a frequent blogger. Perhaps you write weekly, every few days, or daily. When doing that, there are some steps you go through to prime your posts before hitting publish.

Sometimes, these steps are unique; other times, they are rote. They are clicks and selections that you make for every single post regardless of what it is that you’re writing.

After that, there are steps you take to stay in touch with the people who comment on your posts.

All of this becomes time-consuming especially if your blog is a cornerstone of what you do for a living, what you do as a hobby, what you do to share some breaking information, or what you do to generate side-income.

Maintained the same look and feel as the rest of the WordPress administration screens,

And more?

Ultimately, imagine a suite of tools that would allow you to continue what you’ve been doing for days, weeks, months, or years but would help you be more efficient at actually doing it.

In other words, these tools would help you become a better blogger because they’d provide a better blogging experience.

How We Blog

At this point, Eric and I have both been blogging for years, and we’ve been doing so within entirely different niches. The thing is, there are certain things that we do each and every day whenever we’re drafting posts, scheduling posts, or even managing contributing authors and users.

All of the things can be improved with a certain workflow, but they can be improved even more using a set of utilities to augment said workflow.

And that’s what many of these plugins and tools are going to be all about it.

The Dual Nature of WordPress

Often, those in the development space aim to build things for fellow developers, designers, or other tech-types. That’s great – it helps teach the rest of us new things and gives us new ideas for how to write, build, and put together our projects.

But at some point, I think it’s also important to think about the problems that exist for the platforms on which we work. WordPress is uniquely positioned such that it’s a piece of software that people use to manage content, but it’s also unique in that it’s a foundation on which developers can build their tools.

To that end, why not leverage the dual nature of WordPress? Continue to use it to publish great content, and give users a better blogging experience that fits their current workflow.

Join the conversation! 2 Comments

This is awesome! Can’t wait for this suite of plugins to go live. WordPress is a fantastic platform, but a lot of the blog post settings and tweaks are redundant and annoying to check every single time. Could see this being huge for content managers and frequent bloggers.

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